Stephanie King spent about 20 years helping build private label programs with some of the biggest grocery retailers in the country, from Whole Foods to Kroger to Costco. She left with her belief intact that, as she put it, “grocery shopping sucks.”
“But everybody has to do it,” King said. “So my theory was to bring back the corner store and everyday convenience.”
The result is Kitchen & Market, a small and growing chain of Seattle-area mini-grocery stores that feature fresh foods, prepared meal kits, specialty ingredients, random gift items, and a focus on local and female-founded brands.
There’s also a dash of e-commerce thrown in with online ordering and delivery of meal kits available two days a week. But King is not looking to just be a fresher Hello Fresh. Her main vision is tied to an obsession with brick and mortar and putting her corner stores in many more neighborhoods.
Standing in her third location, which opened in March on Evergreen Point Road in Medina, Wash., King beamed at what she has created in three years.
“People’s lives are so busy these days,” she said. “It’s another reason that I think bringing back the corner store and locating these in neighborhoods is so important. It makes life easier. You can just swing in, grab whatever you need for the night and there is none of that emotional dread you feel when you’re pulling into a grocery store parking lot.”
A pivot out of the gate
In early 2020, Kitchen & Market had a business plan, investors, and a location in Pike Place Market.
Then COVID hit and tested the determination of an entrepreneur out to disrupt the grocery business.
With everything shut down, King pivoted to a meal kit pop-up delivery service for a year, working out of the closed Cortina restaurant owned by Ethan Stowell. King calls the Seattle chef a friend and mentor, who now has a small stake as a partner in her business.
The pop-up helped King’s team develop recipes and figure out what people liked. Some of Kitchen & Market’s best-selling items today — now produced at a company commissary south of downtown Seattle — were created during that year of experimentation.
King grew up in Seattle shopping at Pike Place Market. She knew if she ever opened a store, that’s where she wanted to launch it.
“My mom used to come down and buy vegetables at the high stalls and if I was really well behaved I got doughnuts on the other side,” she said.
In the first couple weeks that the Pike Place location was open, two doors down from the original and tourist-heavy Starbucks, King remembers helping a notable customer. She waited on a man wearing a hat and face mask who was determined to know who owned the store, where the concept came from, and who designed it.
King admitted that it was all her, and the customer was Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO and champion of just the type of community-building business that she was now running.
A second Kitchen & Market location eventually opened on Mercer Island, before the new Medina spot, which occupies a space that was also previously a corner store. A fourth spot has been secured in the Eastlake neighborhood, and another Seattle location is in the works.
Into startup world
King left her long career in the grocery business when she had one kid left at home. She decided she needed a new baby.
“Kitchen & Market is more work than children, I’m not gonna lie,” she laughed. “I didn’t think that totally through.”
She attracted interest from a number of private investors and has raised nearly $10 million to date. She credits strong advisors for her success so far, including former PCC Community Markets CEO Cate Hardy and former Starbucks brand and creative chief Terry Davenport.
And she regularly meets with a group of what she calls incredibly supportive women who are founders and small business owners.
“There’s six of us who deep dive once a month to just check in and see if there’s anything we can all do to help support each other,” King said. “And I feel really lucky that I found that.”
Her competition includes such Seattle businesses as Cone & Steiner, which has market and convenience store locations in Capitol Hill and Pioneer Square, and Mainstay Provisions, a cafe and specialty market in Ballard with another planned for the base of an Amazon building in South Lake Union.
Stowell called King the “heart and soul” of Kitchen & Market. He said she’s driven to ensure that the business is a success and understands that it’s equally important to take care of your customers and your employees.
“Managing people and managing expectations and customers, half of it is how you respond. How do you welcome somebody?” Stowell said.
King is learning to understand that technology can be tough for a busy, not-so-tech-savvy founder to wrap her head around. From the functionality of the website to the grocery point of sale, to databases and systems, King said small independent grocers have an uphill challenge competing with the big guys.
“I’m not a tech company but I’ve had to expend so much of my brainpower figuring out how the tech works,” she said.
Mixed thoughts on Amazon
On the other end of the spectrum is another Seattle-based company doing everything it can to learn about how people shop and use grocery stores.
King has mixed feelings about what Amazon is doing in grocery, both from its acquisition of Whole Foods and from the creation of Amazon Go convenience stores and cashierless technology.
“Amazon has taken the approach with Whole Foods that the value proposition for customers is all about price,” King said. “And I believe that Whole Foods was uniquely successful at expanding nationally because they were the nicest grocery store in town, and it felt good to shop there.”
Kitchen & Market, which now employs 50 people across stores, corporate and commissary, sort of feels like a shrunken version of pre-Amazon Whole Foods, with prices to match.
But it doesn’t feel like an Amazon Go at all. There are no cameras tracking the items in shoppers’ carts. And there are human cashiers, so you don’t “Just Walk Out.”
“It’s not that I don’t like the concept. But I didn’t think it felt good for a grocery store. It felt cold,” King said. “There’s a reason people are drawn to farmers markets, you feel connected. Your food is this thing that you put into your body. And I almost feel like there is something so unnatural about putting technology between the thing.”
But she admitted that it makes sense when trying to avoid a beer line at the ballpark, or whenever she’s in an airport trying to buy a bottle of water.
“Anytime technology can eliminate a bad customer experience, I’m all for it,” she said. “But when I want something more than that, then the technology feels like it’s taking that from me.”
Taste test
I left Kitchen & Market with dinner for my family to test King’s theories about convenience and quality.
I have the luxury of sitting down to a home-cooked meal nearly every night of the week. I do almost none of the work involved in making that meal and my wife gets all the credit. I could see the benefit of arriving with dinner (not traditional takeout) practically ready to go, but I was skeptical about the reception from someone who uses cooking to decompress.
I selected an already bagged $40 chicken tinga tostadas meal kit intended to serve 2-3 people. It includes Kitchen & Market’s pre-made chicken tinga, seasoned black beans, creamy jalapeno dressing and cabbage slaw mix, along with tostadas, one avocado, one lime, cilantro and cotija cheese. The website estimates prep time of 15 minutes.
My wife could pull off the same dish, no question, but thinking of a meal plan, shopping for ingredients and slow cooking the chicken all day would have involved much more time and energy.
“This type of thing is kind of cool because it’s almost done,” my wife Traci said. “And because you still have to prepare a little bit of stuff, you still feel like you’re doing something.”
Seated at the table after a quick heating of the chicken and beans and the tostada assembly, we dug in:
- Traci: “It’s got really good flavor. I feel like it’s a different take on something I would make.”
- Kate, age 10: “It’s good. It’s very fresh. I really like the chicken. … and I do like mom’s cooking.”
- Henry, age 16: “I can see mom making this. Honestly, if I got one from the kit and one from mom, I don’t think I’d be able to tell the difference. … I’d say thanks for making dinner, but …”
King said that what has resonated with customers is that Kitchen & Market is essentially an extension of the customer ‘s kitchen.
“We’re your sous chef,” she said. “That is the true reflection of my vision of how to feed people. I want to make it easy. I want to make it pretty. I want to make it enjoyable. I know you can actually make your own salad dressing at home. But do you have time to do that on a Tuesday?”
